And we’re off!

The Pendry is located in the Gaslamp District:

No, I don’t know why it’s called the Gaslamp District, nor has anyone offered an explanation. It certainly gives off that aura of being a tourist center, does it not? And given our stated preference for fine dining, craft cocktails, and artsy stuff, we set off to explore the neighborhood to find these things and start mapping out our dining plans, etc.

Oddly, there did not seem to be many especially fine dining places, nor craft cocktail bars. There were plenty of restaurants, but most of them were solid but basic kinds of places, and most places seemed to be beer kinds of places rather than great cocktails. It was a puzzlement, until we saw…

Petco Park. Home of the Padres. Who have never won a national championship (I learned from our handout; no team from San Diego ever has). The Gaslamp District is a sportsball district.

And artsy stuff? Nada.

Not a problem. We know how to find what we want. We retired to the Pendry’s Fifth & Rose bar, which does serve craft cocktails, for a mid-afternoon tipple and a chat with the bartender, Cody.

I had the Smoke & Mirrors (by Shane, who joined us anon): mezcal, Amaro Montenegro, sweet vermouth, and a house blended smoke and salt bitters. It was very tasty.

I’ve learned by now that if you’re unfamiliar with the city and want to know where the most interesting cocktails are, all you have to do is find a bar that serves those kinds of things and you ask the bartender where the other great bars are.

So of course Cody was able to give us a quick list of places to check out. I’ll report back.

The good folk at Pack Up & Go had scheduled us for a neat little pasta-making class for dinner, but while we rested back in the room — all right, we took a nap — I did some checking about and discovered that the Old Globe Theatre had a show that night: The Notebooks of Leonardo daVinci, conceived and constructed by Mary Zimmerman.

Mary Zimmerman, you may recall, was the deviser of Metamorphoses, a kaleidoscopic adaptation of Ovid’s masterpiece, performed in a shallow pool. Half dance, half spectacle, all amazing — we saw it at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater — and so our evening plans did not involve making pasta, which we already know how to do anyway.

I found us a restaurant near the theatre, Parc Bistro-Brasserie, called the pasta place to let them know we weren’t coming, and off we went. (Another factor in our decision was that we already know how to make our own pasta. As one does.)

Parc is a first-rate French restaurant. Our waiter was in fact a rather handsome Frenchman, charming and personable, and the food was excellent. No, I didn’t take photos. (Their barrel-aged Manhattan was also excellent.)

Our travel package included a $50 gift card for Uber, so we snagged a driver to get us to the theatre, which is in Balboa Park, a vast complex of museums.

The Old Globe:

The poster:

The show:

The entire show is simply the words of da Vinci as he scribbled them down in the thousands and thousands of pages he left behind. It is mind-boggling in its construction and staging. See all those filing cabinet drawers that make up the walls of the set? They were ladders, drawers, display cabinets, set pieces. (More photos here.)

Da Vinci’s work and insatiable curiosity were on full display, as was his sometime pettiness: the sequence where he disses sculptors (i.e., Michelangelo, whom we’ve just heard two women drooling over as a bella uomo) was hysterical.

We left the theatre flabbergasted. I was sincerely moved by the man’s insights and humanity. “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” So say we all.

We snagged another Uber home and went straight to bed like any elderly couple up way past their bedtime.

And we’re off!

It’s already been an adventure: we had only gotten to the corner before we had to turn around to go fetch someone’s science magic watch, the one that tells her how many steps to take or something, that we had forgotten somehow.

Where are we going, you ask?

I had suspected that we might be headed there, but the revised forecast for the weekend seemed very cold for San Diego. (Hold that thought.) The irony is that we already planned to come here next year for The Great Cut 2024, so this will serve as a scouting mission.

The packet from packupgo.com is pretty nifty: It includes our hotel reservation, reservations at a couple of restaurants, a food tour, and a reservation at the hotel spa. There are also lists of things to do and places to eat, all within walking distance. (The Pendry San Diego is in the Gaslamp District.)

The flight was miserable — as is always the case these days — but uneventful. We snagged a cab and headed into town, where our room was ready. We ditched our stuff and headed out to get lunch, which we did at The Melt, a good little burger joint around the corner.

We have now retreated to the hotel to plan out our weekend. (My Lovely First Wife [pictured above] has been frustrated that she has no Top 10 book on which to rely; she’s had to meander, you guys.)

More later. The main thing you need to know is that I’m wearing pants because it was supposed to be cold, and it is not.

At 6:42 a.m. tomorrow (Fri) morning, my Lovely First Wife and I will be at Hartsfield-Jackson International Spaceport and Hair Salon. Where are we off to this time, you might ask?

We have no idea.

This is the envelope we got last week. We are not to open it until we’re headed to the airport, where we will have to print out boarding passes, etc., all on the fly.

It’s from a company called Pack Up + Go, which I learned about when a Facebook friend posted that they had signed up for a trip. It’s pretty simple: you select the category of trip you want to go on, your dates, your budget, and where you’re traveling from.

You also tell them where you’ve traveled recently, places you’d like to go, places you never want to go, and the activities you like. You can also opt for warmer weather, which of course I did.

Then you hand over your credit card and hope for the best.

I gave this to my Lovely First Wife as a Christmas present, because she loves to travel. (I hate to travel. I like being there, but getting there is invariably a pain in the butt.)

I was semi-inspired by New Yorker cartoon (that I cannot find at the moment) that featured a couple, presumably married, and the woman is saying, “I’ve prepared a PowerPoint slide show of all the ways I’d like you to surprise me.” We’ll just say that it resonated with me.

Further, as is well-known in our circles, my Lovely First Wife is an obsessive PLANNER. We joke about her travel books and her lists (while acknowledging that with her along, we don’t have to do anything), so this seemed like an awesome way to practice a little malicious compliance: I’ve given you a trip — but you can’t plan for it.

Bwahahaha, as we say in the supervillain biz.

The company sends you an email the week before, letting you know what the weather is going to be like (highs upper 50s, lows mid-40s, no rain) and what you will want to pack (nothing untoward other than a bathing suit for the spa, but it’s not a beach). I just a moment ago got an email update on the weather, and now I suppose we pack.

Follow along for what I am sure will be a very entertaining long weekend.